Inside TikTok: Culture, strategy, monetization, and more | Ray Cao (Global Head of Monetization Product Strategy and Operations)

Ray Cao and TikTok

Lenny: We rarely get a peek into what it’s like to work at TikTok. What are some core principles or values or just how TikTok operates?

Ray Cao: The number one thing is context, no control. That’s the reason why we’re always encouraging people to see themselves as a business owner.

Cultural Differences: Google vs. TikTok

Lenny: You give them all the information they need and then let them just do things without specific instructions.

Ray Cao: How do you actually solve the puzzle by connecting all the dots together? Just like how I see some of my friends, their kids playing Legos, if you don’t really see the full picture, you won’t be able to make the Lego as one thing at the end of the day. You have to see the other pieces.

The Role of Algorithms in Globalization

Lenny: What else are important cultural values of TikTok, of how TikTok operates that everyone always has in mind when they’re building?

Ray Cao: We always have this mentality we are a startup, we’re a young company, we’re always hungry for growth. And a very wacky way is like, “How can I run my second half of my marathon faster than the first half?”

Importance of Local Cultural Understanding

Lenny: Today my guest is Ray Cao. Ray is the global Head of Monetization Product Strategy & Operations at the Global at TikTok where he has been for over four years. Prior to TikTok, Ray spent six years at Google helping scale Google shopping globally.

TikTok is interesting for two big reasons. One, it’s one of the most successful businesses in history, last valued at over $80 billion. And its parent company is the most valuable private company in the world, last valued at over$200 billion.

Two, TikTok is quickly becoming one of the biggest advertising platforms alongside Meta and Google, and generated nearly $10 billion in advertising revenue just a couple of years ago. So for both these reasons, TikTok is a really interesting business and team to learn from. And I’ve seen very few podcasts and even media get a peek inside how TikTok operates.

In our conversation, we discuss TikTok’s culture, their core principles and values, how they hire, how they move so fast, their emphasis on working hard, how they do OKRs and planning. We also get into how to succeed on TikTok’s ad network, why you want to be testing at least 10 videos a week, how it’s different from running ads on Instagram, how to make content that does well on TikTok, and so much more. This episode has a lot of interesting lessons and insights. Obviously TikTok is at the center of a lot of debate globally. Some people love it, some people hate it. But no matter your opinion of TikTok, there’s a lot that we can learn from their success.

If you enjoy this podcast, don’t forget to subscribe and follow the podcast on your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It’s the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Ray Cao after a short word from our sponsors.

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Ray, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

Ray Cao: Thank you Lenny for having me. It’s a pleasure.

Content Seeding and Creative Strategy

Lenny: It’s my pleasure. I am really excited to have you here because it feels like we rarely get a peek into what it’s like to work at TikTok, how TikTok builds product and operates, also how to be successful in TikTok as a business, as an advertiser. So I have all these kinds of questions for you, and so I’m really happy to be chatting. I wanted to start with a little bit about your time before TikTok, which was at Google and comparing that to TikTok. So, you’re at Google for six years, I believe. Now you’re at TikTok. I’m curious on what stood out to you about the cultural differences between how Google operates and TikTok operates.

Ray Cao: Three major things, I would say. Number one is really how these two company thinking about innovation. So, I think Google has a very strong philosophy of we’re engineering lab and that there’s a lot of technology-driven, and a lot of pieces. They are not necessarily always trying to, I would say, cope with the market even, right? However, I think at the TikTok, I think besides the technology part, we do have a very keen, I would say, appetite to really understand what the markets really want and also how can we really service our clients in a better way and the clients here is not necessarily only for advertisers including our user and also creator altogether. So that’s one of the things I think it’s very different in terms of TikTok way of work. It’s very customer-centric in a way, and again, the customer here is not necessarily only for the business partner but also for our regular user and creators on the platform.

And the second one is really thinking about how we take approach on product development. So a lot of times that we take a very rigid approach in terms of product development and oftentimes you see us that experimenting a lot of different things all the same time. And also we do have a lot of engineering and [inaudible 00:07:04] project in the backend to really understand how can we optimize better for the platform. So a lot of time, these are the things that I think TikTok is doing really, really well.

The last piece I have to say is the approach for global prioritization. A lot of times that you see a US-born company go global and oftentimes still they are really rooted with the US market and there’s nothing wrong with it to be honest, because this is the biggest market for them as I would say for East-born company. I think a lot of times that we can take approach with truly how do we think about globalization and for example, we launched a lot of product not necessarily first in North America. We launched it in South Asia for example, for our shopping, really very big initiative internally for shopping and we launched our really creator fund here in North America. We launched our gaming approach, really serviced our EUI gaming advertisers. Really, really strong over there. So there are a lot of different approach in terms of how do we prioritize our go-to-market and also product development. So that’s the part I feel like we’re very unique in the market or unique to some of that was the tech company born in the US.

TikTok Culture: Context, Not Control

Lenny: It reminds me there’s this piece by this smart guy, Eugene Wei who wrote a few things about TikTok over the years and just why it’s been so successful and one of his really big points is that TikTok can work really well in other markets ‘cause it’s basically… you don’t need to know a ton about the market because it’s this algorithm that figures out what people in each market want. Is there anything along those lines you’ve seen that just has been really fundamental to it working so well in many different markets?

Ray Cao: The algorithm is definitely helping because it is basically the machine is doing a lot of heavy lifting. That’s actually I think across the board on a technology company today. The difference is actually how much you are willing to take the heavy lifting over there in the market. By that I mean really sending your troops into the market, hiring your local talent, understanding the culture and really understanding the behavior from those users. I understand the machine can do things, but also at the same time that we need to actually get local talent to fine tune the machine. So there are a lot of conversations about how I would say technology is able to change our life, but I do think that at the end of the day, I do believe technology is a tool.

So if we do have a ambition to go global, you have to do one more thing is actually take your step into global. Rather than having the machine do the heavy lifting, you have to really understand in local culture. I had a fun background for my first job is to really doing go-to market research in the Southeast Asia area. I think there was only one thing opened my eyes after a year and a half in this career path is different market have totally different, I would say, culture and these market behaviors are actually coming out of this culture. One of the fun example I always been using was I was doing market research for one of the suppliers for toner and also these ink cartridges for Thailand as a go-to market research. One of the things is always concern to my, at that point, the client was they cannot figure out why their premium product cannot sell in Thailand and then we just figure out because the quality of their printing machine and also their ink cartridges are premium and the quality of the paper and everything is very good.

But when you actually do talk to those consumers in those market, the answer is very eye-opening. They literally told me at that time is I don’t care. I don’t care if your ink cartridges or your printer is at the premium quality, maybe the printer I can use, but I can use compatible ink cartridges or toner for that because my consumer won’t care about your printing quality or the majority of my consumer won’t care. So in that case you should not necessarily worried about if you are a premium product, it’s actually more about how durable, how reliable you’re able to print things and people can read.

So I think these are the insights I think a lot of times it will be neglected from some of clients or the manufacturers or even the owner of the business because they think that we want to serve this segmentation, but, however, this segmentation is that big in this area. So that’s reason why the culture is really the key part from the market. If you don’t understand the culture, you won’t be able to understand the behavior over there. It’s more about that, I think, when we say about globalization or take the product go to market in a global scheme or even build it apart, you have to get your hands dirty and to really understand the local culture so that you can understand local behavior.

Hiring High-Caliber Talent

Lenny: I love that advice, the way you described it, which I love also is that you kind of have to fine-tune the algorithm and the product to work in different cultures. Is there an example of how that was done with TikTok, like a tweak that had to be made or some kind of fine-tuning that happened for it to work in a different market?

Always Day One

Ray Cao: Yeah. I think we did a lot of fine-tuning on our user product side to really think about content. So that’s the number one thing going to be super different coming from each of the market and also from each of the culture. For example in Japan, how do you actually get more content that relevant for the culture? A lot of people may think, okay, are you guys only doing dancing or doing singing for Japan? The answer is not. It is actually more food on the TikTok side, like how do you actually introducing new food restaurant or new recipes and also sometimes that you’re introducing a new technology. I would say 3C like consumer electronics product over there. So these are the content get really popular sometimes in Southeast Asia or even Japan area and versus in the US as everybody knows that we’re starting from really lip-syncing at a very early stage but now really we’re expanding to shopping behaviors and also a lot of people using us as a main platform to acquire new discovery for the product.

So these are the things I think different market definitely deserves and demand different kind of treatment and if you are able to do this a lot, you’re able to find success over there.

Tight Cross-Team Collaboration

Lenny: That’s really interesting because you could think it’s just this algorithm that figures everything out for you, but I think what you’re pointing out is you have to seed it with the right sorts of use cases that that culture is most excited about.

Document Reading Meetings

Ray Cao: Another good example will be creative, so it’s a very good example how human can work with technology together. We have a ton of creatives and we have a ton of content so, of course, we use machine to label those content use metadata to analyze those content. However, a lot of times you can find that when we’re really thinking about how creative can help advertisers? Humans actually make a more interesting or more, I would say, influencing decisions over there. For some of the verticals we can say that, “Oh, you know what, maybe we can try a coupon image with a new product like a sticker on the top?” This maybe actually work better compared to some of the price promotion even. So a lot of things really depends on how do you actually interpreting the numbers and interpreting the data points but also at the same time your business acumen is going to be very important here to make a judgmental call for some of the situation like that. I think we’re still rely a lot on both machine and also our own experts to analyzing those trends and give it the recommendations.

Immersive Field Visits

Lenny: Awesome. Okay, so there’s a few threads I’m going to follow later. You talked about the product development process, so I’m going to want to spend time there, also about how to be successful in TikTok both as a creator also as a business, I’m excited to hear your advice there. But I want to spend a little more time first on just what it’s like to work within TikTok and the culture of TikTok. What are some core principles or values or just how TikTok operates if you had to identify, here’s the ways that we all think about what we want to do and the most important to your day-to-day work, what words and concepts come to mind?

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Ray Cao: The number one thing resonating really, really well with me is context, no control. Oftentimes when we are looking around companies different sizes, we’re looking at how to collaborate. Oftentimes we see the behavior that a lot of people just working on a smaller piece based off their job description. So hey, you’re working on go-to-market and you’re working on data analytics, and you’re working on this book of business and commerce, and you’re working on auto industry for example. A lot of times that these human-made silos is actually slowing things down because humans are not, or our talent, they’re not supposed to be categorized into different basket. They may have their own majority responsibility for sure, but we don’t want to cap them into this kind of a box we created. That’s really why we’re always encouraging people to think out of the box and think more and think themselves as a business owner rather than a piece of machine that keep the machine running.

Oftentimes that will say context, no control. That means you actually can go above and beyond to really think about your whole business problem as your own problem and your piece is maybe one part of it to solve the puzzle, but how do you actually solve the puzzle by connecting all the dots together, we’re encouraging all the people to think like that way and by that I think we kind of mentally break out those walls. So encouraging our team members to do a little bit more thinking is very important. It’s a little bit more thinking because the think part is very important.

And then, now in terms of getting things into behavior or changes or getting to action, then you need to really collaborate with other teams because we don’t want to necessarily creating, hey, you’re on other people’s working group now you’re actually stepping on other people’s toes now. It is not the situation we’re trying to encourage in, but where it’s encouraging more is context, no control, think more about how you can change it and then we you do really actually take some actions, be active. You reach out to who’s supposed to be the owner of that and then have a discussion so then you you’re able to connecting the dots altogether.

So that’s one thing I think it’s very unique to our culture. I think it’s very, very important for us to continue to grow at this speed because everybody have a, I would say, full visibility towards our full ownership to their mindset, how they can contribute.

How Product Orgs Move Fast

Lenny: And the key there is context implying you give them all the information they need and then let them just do things without giving them specific instructions, “Hey, I need you to hit this goal, work on this project, launch this thing. Here is what we know, do the things you think are best, roughly.” Right now, I know it’s not just like anyone does anything, but I imagine that’s kind of the implication there.

Lessons in Building GTM Teams

Ray Cao: Yeah, I think it’s context, no control plus proactive thinking and reactive doing so you have to do more proactive thinking with these contexts. Now reactive doing means that you need to collaborate, but when everybody has this kind of mindset, the collaboration should be very smooth because people have the context altogether. The part that I see maybe some of the other company are facing challenges is actually there’s too many IOs in between and you have people that are just protecting their own thing and working their own thing and then I’m delivering. But just like how I see some of my friends, their kids playing Legos, if you don’t really see the full picture, you won’t be able to make the Lego as a one thing at the end of the day. You have to see the other pieces. So that’s the part I think it’s really powerful and reasoning really, really well when we’re really thinking about product development and also product go-to-market. So it’s a pretty full cycle. People have to see this and then they have the context.

Lenny: I love this, and this has come up actually a few times recently when I was talking to the CTO of Netflix and also OpenAI. They’re very similar in culture where it’s give people a lot of autonomy and freedom and not a lot of do this, do this, do this. The key there is to hire very high quality people and very high caliber people because if not, then things won’t work out too great. Is there anything along those lines that you can share just like yeah, the kinds of people you end up hiring and how you hire people that can work well in that environment?

Lessons from Context Over Control

Ray Cao: I agree with you. So the caliber of these people is actually pretty important to support the structure I just talked about, and oftentimes I can see some people that with the quality of always curious. Curiosity is a very important quality when I’m actually talking to my interviewers because I want to see that they are naturally curious to new things. They want to learn more about the new things and don’t really get stuck with their own things. That’s one thing. And the other thing is the discipline because like I said, it is actually a double-edged sword in this case. So it could potentially introducing some of the chaotic situation in a company because everybody is thinking everything. The discipline here is actually how you are really following the guidance on reactive doing, be always thinking about how to collaborating, and the discipline here and also the rigorous approach here is also going to be very important.

One of the good example that is the ability to prioritize because I don’t believe one thing is everybody can do everything. You have to prioritize properly so that you’re able to push the right agenda. So I think that’s more of the quality of the people we’re looking for is… it is hard, don’t get me wrong. It is really hard to say that we can find everyone like that, but we would love to believe that we can train our employees like that so that they’re able to even do better in their longer-term career.

Keeping a Pulse on the Market

Lenny: Essentially what you look for when you’re hiring people is making sure they’re always curious, they have high discipline, and that they prioritize well. Coming back to the cultural pieces of TikTok, so the main one you’ve shared so far is this idea of context, not control. What else are important cultural values of TikTok, of how TikTok operates that everyone always has in mind when they’re building and new meetings, making decisions?

Reasons for Success and Leaving TikTok

Ray Cao: Yeah, another internal thing that we always say is always day one, we want to make sure that we always have this mentality we are a startup. We are a young company. We’re always hungry for growth. We don’t want to fall into the trap that people may think, “Oh, you guys are very successful in the market and then you are not necessarily need to worry about your existence anymore.” I think it is actually something we’re trying to avoid. We always want to make sure that in our team members always think like, “Okay, if this is actually a new day for you, I know what other things that you always want to keep in your mind you want to do.” And also to keep that spirit is very important.

A lot of times that I can see some of the mature company, they’re not necessarily losing the edge of, I would say this competition or losing the edge of being innovative. I think it’s more about some of the culture has been shifted because you have a lot of new employees that live in your culture. So not necessarily it’s not going to be like the old days that the co-founder is sitting among you, but I do think this company has a very interesting behavior. I see there is I can talk to anyone at any time via our internal communication system. I can ping Shuo right now. I can ping the co-founder if I want to tomorrow.

We always keep this kind of mentality internal is that we’re still a young company, we want to grow and you can feel free to talk to anyone. We don’t have a limitation for that as long as you have a good opinion, I would love to hear from you. Is that creating some of the, I would say chaotic situation? It might be, but I do think that this keeps the company very energetic. People are willing to share, people are willing to engage. That’s very important.

I want add one more thing. We just talked about, you asked me what is actually the uniqueness of TikTok versus the other company. It’s very tied up to that is I have never seen a company, the engineering team and the product team and the sales team are so close. That’s definitely one of aha moments I had because if you’re thinking about if your engineer does not really know what the market wants and if your PM doesn’t really know what is actually the client’s feedback, they won’t be able to get a right product in the market. They just won’t be. And they won’t even tell a good go-to-market story to advertisers or even to our users because they just don’t know what the end users are thinking.

So I think it’s a very secret sauce for us is that our sellers and our engineering team and our product team and also data scientist team, we’re all collaborating really, really closely and that’s very much, I would say a such big advantage for us compared to when a company becomes too big and nobody talks to each other. So I do hope that it is the thing that we’re going to continue reinforce along the years where we’ll continue to grow the company.

Choosing to Work Hard

Lenny: What does that actually look like? I imagine people hearing this are like, “Yeah, we’re going to make sales and product and hinge very close.” I imagine many people don’t actually do this too well. How do you actually execute that? Is it they report to the same leader, they sit next to each other or I don’t know, zoom next to each other? What actually makes that work?

Ray Cao: Yeah, I think a couple of things. Number one is a structure. Everything has to go at a structure. So we do have a meeting structure that we called it… it used to be by month and now it’s actually a quarterly level. We get everybody together, engineering leader, product leader, and also not necessarily only the leader level. Some of the team members, we’re joining the force together to have a big meeting. That meeting is 180 people-ish. It’s crazy to have a meeting at that size, especially that there are different kind of functionality there. But one thing we keep really well is actually we are using a reading format of meeting. So it’s a doc reading. We just read in comments and understanding the context again. It is the doc, bring everybody together, and then we discuss the things that we want to make a decision with or the things that we feel is a blocker or things that we need to celebrate.

So that meeting structure keep everybody together and consensus, again, not necessarily only for the top leaders. It’s normal for the engineering leader and product leader and sales leader at the company level, they talk to each other, but we made that happen for their core team members. And the very beginning of my time here, that was literally getting to the IC level. So it is pretty eye-opening for me to join that meeting first time because I was get so used to their level of different meetings at Google, but here it’s like, okay, everybody read one documentation and then you just understand what are people talking about or thinking about. It is intentional. But I do think that that structure is a very big secret sauce, I would say, not necessarily we invented it, right? We also learned from the other companies. So it is actually one of the things that we actually deployed pretty well today here to keep that structure running.

And the other thing is really feed those, I would say, first-hand market information to our PMs and RDs. That means we took them out with us. We’re just inviting them together to join the force together to meet the clients and a lot of the company, if you want to meet APMs, if you want to meet the engineering leaders, it’s literally once a year maybe, and also if you’re investing a ton with some of the platforms. For us, I think it’s always on to junior PMs, senior PMs and engineering leaders. We invited them together to these immersion trips recorded to really get face time with our clients, to really feel the heat. They are actually really facing a challenge by using our own product.

So that kind of, I would say, the aha moment is bringing a lot of, I would say, insights to them and also get them to feel the heat of the pains the sellers may feel. So that worked really well, too. I think oftentimes it is a battle. It is not necessarily the general, you have to stay in the back, you sometimes have to go to the front, but we just make sure that the general go to the front quite often in our company to do that.

TikTok’s OKR Practices

Lenny: I love that concept of having them feel the heat. An interesting trend I’ve noticed is there’s a lot of Amazon influence on the way you all operate. It’s always day one idea. There’s the memo culture you just described. Any idea where that comes from? Is there like a senior Amazon person that came in and helped influence those sorts of things? Is it just hey, Amazon’s killing in there? I’ve noticed interestingly, Amazon has influenced the most companies in all of their ways of working, so it’s not a surprise. I’m just curious if there’s anything else there that’s interesting.

Ray Cao: I think we have the benefits to standing on the shoulder of all the giants. So we learned definitely always there when the culture that Amazon was always championing, I think we learned from them. So this is something that we, I would say, always trying to listen and trying to learn from industry. The dark fashion is also learned from Amazon, so we kind of studied, oh, this is maybe one of the best practices we can employ here, how we deploy here. So we tried it, not even mentioned we have the OKR system, so it is actually a very good learning from our early stage from Google. So all these, I think definitely we do have some of the, I would say, benefits being the newcomer to the market and then learn a lot of the best practices coming from our industry peers and really deployed here hopefully successfully.

And some of the things that we just tweaked. So for example our culture always day one is definitely very similar to Amazon, but the implementation of that could be different. And also the context, no control piece is, I believe other companies may have the similar idea, but for us I think we just really need to implement it in a way that’s going to be fitting to us. I happened to listen to your podcast with the Airbnb co-founder the other day. He also mentioned that how he break out the IOs. I think it is very similar approach among industry right now trying to really make sure the team is able to talk to each other because I think a quote from him, “If your PM doesn’t know how to sell the product they’re creating, you won’t be able to do your job better.” So this is literally how we’re thinking about it, too, in a lot of way.

The Planning Cadence

Lenny: I know that you all move very fast and I want to actually talk about that next. And with that it feels like your value should be, it’s always the first half of the day instead of it’s always day one. It’s always the morning of the first day.

Ray Cao: I think the value, if I put it in a very reactive way is, “How can I run my second half of my marathon faster than the first half?” So that’s how I think about it and how do we really continue pushing for it.

Tips for Succeeding on TikTok

Lenny: Wow, that sounds very hard and painful, but I like that metaphor. Okay, so let’s talk about how you set up the product org to move as fast as you move. I think there’s this idea of just running fast. I don’t know if that’s a phrase you use, but just how is the product org set up, especially different from other teams that you’ve seen that allows it to move as quickly as you move and innovate as often as you all innovate?

Creator Case Studies

Ray Cao: Our product teams are setting, I would say, very importantly is global. So we want to actually, like I said, the number one step is if we really want to do global business, we have to go global. So we set up teams really across the board in the global locations to really acquire global talent who knows the market and who knows the competition, too. So we’re able to really getting the, let’s say jumpstart, in the local market. So for example, we have the majority of the engineer and also PMs currently located in the west coast of North America, so Los Angeles and also San Jose. These are the key hubs we have for our tech folks and also for North America wise we do have our majority of the go-to-market leads sitting in New York to get closer with our seller and also with our clients at the same time.

Also, it is not necessarily only for North America. Like I said, we heavily invested in Southeast Asia, so you can see that a lot of our engineering and also PM resources are deployed over there in Singapore to enable them to get closer to our clients over there as well. So really deploy your resources globally and also focusing on the key markets you want to penetrate. That’s the commitment. I think we’re doing pretty good in this case. And the second one is to really, again, I think the PMs and the product team of settings are oftentimes I would say because we’re growing so fast, oftentimes we have to do a lot of minor team adjustment to catering for that. So it is very usual or common for teams to do a little bit of work on an annual basis or even on a two years or three year cycle. The stability is important, don’t get me wrong, but I do think that as a faster growing company, we need to consistently to reiterate not only the product but also our teams.

So how can we do reiteration on the PM side, on the go-to-market side, it is actually something that I have seen this company doing really, really well. Not necessarily we’re bonding to one team structure. We’re actually bonding to the market need and we’re bounding to the growth we’re looking for. So we’re not afraid to break our seams. And actually I literally break out my team last year to make sure that my team having more go-to-market mindset to actually embedded them with seller directly. So these are the things that very, I would say conventional to a size of this company, but I do think that’s necessary and also that’s a good mentality for the team to really run faster with this kind of a rigid approach. So yeah, these are the two things I think very unique to us, I think could also be continuously helping us in the next phase of the growth.

The TikTok Ad Network

Lenny:

I know you mentioned earlier when we were chatting offline is when you were trying to build the go-to-market org for this stuff, you failed in some ways and there’s some things you learned from that experience. What went wrong when you first tried to approach this?

Ray Cao: Yeah, when I joined the company, there were only two people on the go-to-market side.

TikTok vs. Instagram Ad Differences

Lenny: For the advertising business.

Advertising as Discovery

Ray Cao: There are only two people and by that time the US and plus, I would say, Europe business together, we’re having less than 80 people, but the business needs to grow and we need to hire really fast. The first mistake I made was… By the way, the goal is to hiring 100 people in a six month to support the go-to-market. That is the speed we’re into. So that is early 2020 to middle of 2020. So within six months I need to hire, I would say, 100 people to supporting the global go-to-market structure and build everything. Then the first mistake I made just at the right point because we’re trying to grow too fast and sometimes as a hiring manager I have to compromise the standard we’re trying to hire. So that’s the mistakes I think I made first and I think nobody should repeat that mistake is you need to always run for the quality rather than the quantity. So it’s a easy mistake. You can fall into the trap because the business demands you to go faster. If you don’t have the manpower, you won’t be able to.

But I would say, believe me when I say this, this is a pain, right, when you have the wrong people on the team, it’s not necessarily going to make you move faster, it’s going to actually slow you down. So that’s one of the biggest mistake I made for my first year when I created the team and not necessarily myself only. So also the managers reporting to me, they’re facing the same pressure and then it’s cascading down. So it’s definitely the mistakes we made at early stage.

The second thing I can think about is really on the context, no control. It is not necessarily I’m born into, to be honest, because I was trained really like, “Hey, this is your box, finish your work here and then you’re good.” But the reason why I value that really the attitude more today is literally I failed at the very early stage of my time here because I was trying to creating that kind of a very black and white discipline for my team, “You can do this, you cannot do that.” But technically speaking, that’s literally slowing things down because a lot of times you can see that, “Hey, we’re delivering our go-to-market strategy and we’re good.” But literally what you don’t know is your goal is not to deliver the go-to-market strategy. Your goal is to land your go-to-market strategy with sales together. So if your job only is delivering, no, you’re failed oftentimes because you’re not really getting the market context, you’re not even talking to your clients. So that was literally another mistake I think taught me how to really embrace the culture. Here is context, no control.

And the third piece, I think, it’s also a mistake, really a hard moment for me as well is, for the past couple of years now, I’ve been managing a such big global organization, oftentimes even not myself, my managers, they don’t have time to go detail and to go talk to the clients, which is very scary because again, if you don’t know, you don’t hear what is happening in the market, you won’t know the details in the market, you won’t be able to take the right movement or take the right approach to go to market or even give the feedback to the engineering team.

So it’s very important that the leader at any level needs to be situational. You cannot always down to the wheat and you cannot really distance yourself from the reality. So you need to find the balance to really get engaged and also see yourself out there to getting, I would say, getting deeper into the problems, to identify the problems, and then you’re able to perform even better. Because I don’t believe one thing is you are the pure, I was the people manager. You cannot do that because when you do that, you’re very, very at the very, I would say, position to really thinking about your career because you’re losing your competitive edge from the other, I would say equivalent talents in the market.

Following Trends and Duolingo Takeaways

Lenny: I love these stories. I love stories of things not working out, so I appreciate you sharing these things. When someone doesn’t work out at TikTok and they have a bad time and they get let go or they leave, what’s the most common reason other than just they’re not good enough? Is there something that just doesn’t stick with people that often leads to this is not the place for me?

Ray Cao: Yeah, I would try to really thinking about this in a different way. I can tell how people can be more successful here. So I definitely can see we’re just talking about people being very curious and people are very, being nimble. They can be more successful here. At the same time, I think we have to admit one thing, join a start-up and join a rocket ship is a lifestyle. It is not necessarily a job you are working on from 9 to 5. So it is a different lifestyle and it is not built for everyone. So if you are not able to adjust your mentality towards some of the work that we are here to do and it’s maybe not right fit for you. I’m not saying that that candidates is incapable. I think they could be capable in the other scenario for sure, but is the right fit? I think that is, I would say very much towards the situation or the company status in the market.

I can see a lot of people that they left and become very successful, too. So it is not necessarily that, “Oh, we think you’re not good and then you’re going to be not good for every single other company.” That’s not the case.

And one thing, and also this is my team culture I try to create is, I’m happy to say that when an employee reach out to me, say, “Hey Ray, I’m actually leaving the company,” as long as they’re telling me that they’re going to a better place or a place that they can continue to grow their career, I’m happy for them because oftentimes my last question during my interview is, “What is actually your goal in the next three to five years?” And also I’d be really honest with them, say, “Hey, I don’t think this is the job for you forever. Nobody going to work in this forever. If you can, great. But what is really your North Star?” I think that’s the part that I would love to co-partner with you because I always believe one thing is it is not only about achieving the company goal, it’s also achieving really the career goal or your employee’s career goal together.

So I want to creating that culture here as well. So yeah, I think I’m doing so far so good. Most of my team members when they actually are moving on internally or externally, I’m able to say that, “Okay, that’s a good choice. If I were you, I may probably do the same thing.” It is actually a very good culture, I think, I would love to champion across.

From Brand Awareness to Full-Funnel Conversion

Lenny: On that first point, I’m also a huge advocate of just, “You’ll be successful if you work very hard.” I know there’s a bit of a backlash at working along and thinking too much about work-life balance. And I feel like it’s actually really important to work a lot and work long hours often to be successful, especially at a company that’s going through this ‘cause that’s not going to last forever.

Ray Cao: I think at the end of the day it’s a personal choice. It’s very much like a personal choice. If you are excited about this, if you want to grow together, yeah, this maybe is a good thing for you. And also depends on the life stage. So some of the people they want to actually getting more family time, I think that’s also the right choice, too. But it just depends on your, I would say, your personal choice rather than if the company demands that. I mean, I cannot force my team to working long hours. I don’t want them to working long hours. I think it’s more about if you are able to deliver, right? If it requires a bit, a longer time to contribute, I think it’s okay, but you’ll also get rewarded very well too. So what’s get in, what’s get out. So I think it’s, again, I do believe that this is the quality and also the value we’re evaluating here as well.

How Startups Can Advertise on TikTok

Lenny: And even though it’s hard in the moment, I find that those are the times you remember most and most fondly in your career, when you just go all in, “I’m going to work really hard and do the best possible job I can do.” Assuming that doesn’t last forever, those end up being the most impactful, helpful to your career. Most proud moments when you’re just like, “Look what I had accomplished.” And so I’m on the same page. I want to talk about being successful on TikTok as a creator, as a business, as an advertiser. But a couple more questions real quick on how TikTok operates. You mentioned you do OKRs just briefly, is there anything that you’ve learned about being successful doing OKRs within TikTok? Maybe is there anything different that you all do versus how other companies think about OKRs?

Ray Cao: It is definitely a company alignment that we are using OKR as our basically the system to make sure that everybody is working towards the same goal. I think definitely we have a lot of room to improve. So how often do you actually see your team able to go to OKR at the end of a quarter and also putting OKR really two weeks or one week before the beginning of a quarter? I have to say that shame on me. I sometimes delay it a little bit, but I think the goal is always there to using OKR system as our North Star to drive the behavior and also to align. Again, it’s very important to align on the OKRs because I can see a lot of times the OKRs are putting in, but they are very siloed and that is not really necessarily helpful for the company want achieving really high growth. So I think it’s very important that we know we don’t take OKR as a shell, but we take OKR as its core is cross-functional alignment, cross-functional goal silo. So these are the things we’re still continuing improving.

Platform Learning and Content Creation

Lenny: Is the way that OKRs work at TikTok, is there an OKR per team and they all kind of trickle up to a company level OKR? Is it less structured that way and teams decide if they want to use OKRs or not? How does that roughly work?

Ray Cao: The structure is, basically the guidance is, using the key result to evaluating and then you put the steps in between. So that’s how at least my team has been using this. I think the things that we can improve is the input and output. So the output is very clear, but what is actually the input sometimes is debatable, sometimes I have to say. And also oftentimes your output is other people’s input. Are you able to connect the dots over there, too? Then that’s actually the part that requires a lot of, I would say reinforcement alignment. Definitely we’re getting better, don’t get me wrong. We’re totally not perfect, for sure. But I do see there is a lot of, I say momentum, to leveraging the system better. If you know other companies doing this really, really good, please shoot them my way. I would love to learn from them.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Lenny: One last question here. You do planning, you have OKRs. Just briefly, how often do you all do planning? Is there a yearly plan that you put together and then a quarterly detailed plan?

Ray Cao: Yeah, we do have annual planning cycle, but I have to say that our annual planning cycle is the baseline. We often do a lot of iterations in the middle of the year and also on a quarterly basis that we’re able to pivoting really nimbly to really catering to the things that we see in the market. Some of the longer term strategy won’t change, just like the platform we want to always creating, inspiring and also frictionless and immersive experiences for users. This won’t change, but anything into the core of how do we realizing that you’re always a consistent experiment over there. I cannot speak for the user product side, but at least from advertising product side that this is always the approach we’re taking. And for the go-to-market part, that’s also creating a very different behavior for us because oftentimes if we have a solid and kind of a static product roadmap, you can do go-to-market relatively easy, I would say, because everything is planned. But with a environment like that that basically make the go-to-market and also the product feedback loop much more short and faster.

So there’s a lot of, I would say, pressure or actually put it nicely, there was a lot of innovative things that on the go-to-market side. Also on the sales side, the company or the teams need to actually do to make sure that we’re able to catering for that. But again, this is a teamwork rather than only one side of the work. So far so good, I would say. A lot of things that we’ve been able to achieve within the past couple of years has been already proven that this approach has been working for us, but not necessarily they’re always is perfect already, always room to improve, to make sure that we have more structural approach as well so that the market able to keep the pacing with us. We don’t want to overwhelm our advertisers or our users either. So that’s also the other part that we need to continue optimizing, too.

Some Final Thoughts

Lenny: Okay. Let’s talk about a different topic which is being successful on TikTok. So the way I think about it in my head is, there’s how to be successful is just a regular human creator person. How to be successful as a business, trying to just create viral content and then being successful as an advertiser, which I know is where you spend a lot of time. So let me just ask, is there a tip you could share for someone to be successful, say aka go viral on TikTok? I imagine your answer will be just produce something people love and want to share and like. But I guess is there anything that could be tactically useful when you’re creating content in TikTok to help you go viral?

Ray Cao: I think if I know that I definitely will already become a very successful creator, I have to say. Our system is very much smarter than I am. I cannot trick the system, but I have seen a couple of good cases. So number one thing is that you have to really be unfiltered. I mean, you don’t really need to be perfect on this platform. I mean that’s the beauty of it. You can be yourself, you can really share the things that you like. And if you’re really master at one thing that you’re really, really good at and you want to showcase, this is the platform for you to shine because not necessarily that we are fully saturated and also all algorithm distributing the content in a very different way. Some of the other platforms they are, I would say like a people-based or friend-based.

I think for us it’s purely based on actually you’re creating something that everybody want to see. So let’s see if we can distribute it more. So I think continuously to bring new content to this platform and testing and finding your own competitive edge going to be very important as a successful creator. And most of our creators have been doing that. And I can see some of our biggest TikTok stars, they’re literally practicing this every single day. And I do think that creativity and that part of, I would say, getting the nuances is the key part that to be more successful on the T TikTok community.

And the second thing is it’s including also for brands as well, because I consider brands as our creator as well. They really need to embrace the culture and the community here to really listen and understand what are the user behaviors on the platform to understand what do they like to see. And also the messages or the presence could be very different from your other media channels, or as a creator, it could be very different from your other, I would say, platforms.

So that’s the other thing that it’s going to be challenging because for them to shift in the mindset. But I do think that definitely was trial. Some of the, I would say, our early adopters has already been proven that when you do embrace the culture here, you’re able to acquire a ton of different kind of a user or the audience to your channel and you can show a different side of yourself as well. So yeah, I’ve been trying to do that. I have not really finding my competitive edge I have to say, but I’ll keep trying.

Lenny: Is there an example you could share of someone that has done that really well, either be really authentic and also embrace the community of a business specifically that has done this really well and has taken off not as an advertiser?

Ray Cao: There was one creator I remember called Sheba. She’s a singer and she is able to caught my eyes because she was able to basically rap and also during some of the songs cover in a very different way because she’s a minority and she was able to basically using her minority identity as actually everybody was thinking, “I’m supposed to be doing Bollywood music, but actually, you know what I’m not. I’m doing a lot of very just hip hop and also the music that people may think like I’m not good at.”

So it is pretty fun to watch that kind of a comparison or the contrast between a creator and also she’s able to put a lot of original music on the platform to really inspire more people to do the same thing. There’s another music, I would say TikTok creator. So he was pretty big on the other platforms, but the total approach from him is he’s basically changing the lyrics, make it very relatable as a personal life. Because for example, he can totally change the lyrics from a old Backstreet Boys song or Nsync song to make it related with his daily communication with his wife. Make it really relatable and fun. So these are the things I think is very unique to us. If you are able to test and find something new like that, you’re able to find a new batch of audience and even go viral on the platform.

Lenny: So then switching to the advertising network, a lot of listeners here are thinking about, I imagine, advertising on TikTok. There’s kind of classically been Facebook and Google are the two places to do run paid ads. Paid ads are a huge growth driver for tons of companies. It’s one of the easiest you could say, or one of the most traditional way to grow. TikTok obviously is emerging and has already emerged as one of the newer advertising networks. So there’s a lot of people thinking about how do I succeed as an advertiser on TikTok. So what advice do you have for people? One, who’s it best for? I imagine TikTok isn’t the best place to advertise for every sort of business. So what sort of businesses are best aligned to be successful on TikTok? And then just what advice can you share to do well as an advertiser on TikTok?

Ray Cao: Yeah, I see a lot of really different type of advertisers already find their success on the platform. One thing that they actually can do that is really due to a couple of things that they’re doing. Number one is, like I said, they’re embracing this platform. They actually do a lot of things is TikTok first. I have a couple of advertisers. They have actually creating their own internal creative team just dedicated for TikTok. So they actually produce a ton of creative every single day to actually test and learn to understand the platform and understand the community they are engaging with. So I would say leaning in is the first part. It’s harder, but it is not that hard. As long as you try it, you’ll feel that every single day is getting easier. And also we make a lot of tools to make things easier for them as well. Like creative, we have also a lot of resources on the platform, the creative hub and also we have creative analytics to help you. So these are the things that we’re able to basically help the advertiser to leaning in more.

The other angle to leaning in more is test and learn. A lot of times that people don’t know how to really run ads on this platform. Google is very much search, like search fronts. They are really leading on the intent graph. And Meta is really on the people graph they’re making. I mean TikTok is the content graph. It’s very different, I would say machine compared to the other two. And it requires different way to optimizing and to leveraging the tools we have. So if you’re applying the same logic from Meta or Google into TikTok, not necessarily you’ll be able to see a great success, I have to say.

So you have to really get to the detail and to learn how you’re operating this platform at the very beginning. Of course, like I said, we’re trying to make things as simple as possible because we strongly believe that an advertiser’s job is to taking care of their own business and our job is to service them. So we definitely make things a bit easier and along the way, but still it’s a little bit learning for advertisers to change their mindset when they engage with us the first time. And I can see that again, for example, last Q4, I can see a lot of advertisers taking this approach to really listen to us and understanding what is our best practices. They actually see a very successful Q4 on the platform. So I do think that if you want to do more, just do more test and learn with us and to really understand the impact from TikTok.

Lenny: Just to understand this point about versus Instagram, I think a lot of people probably run on them on both platforms and try to see which one’s working better. Your point is the same content won’t work as well on one versus the other. So just so people understand what the main difference there is. I know you talk about there’s the friend graph versus TikTok just spreads it all over and anyone can see it. You don’t have to be friends and it’s really good at getting content out. So what is it that you would do differently if you’re making an ad video for Instagram versus TikTok?

Ray Cao: I think the TikTok video, it’s more about the backend settings, right? So how often do you actually changing creatives? I think for us it is actually pretty… you want to actually test more creatives on this platform and see which one is actually working. And then we also have really detailed guidance on how do you set up your campaign structure to make sure that you’re able to be more successful on the platform. So these are, I would say, the basic hydrangeas we talked about. You can see these guidance are very different from what Meta has today or even Google has today because we’re just basically different platforms. And oftentimes you can also hear that we requires a bit more real time react on the platform due to some of the trends we have seen.

So that is the part I feel like if advertiser wants to engage more with really the sales team and they’re able to provide more guidance to you and you’re able to see more success there. But a lot of things will be counterintuitive I would say, because the intuitive you have learned is coming from the other platforms, but technically we’re not. So a lot of things that, “Oh, this doesn’t make sense to me, but why don’t you try it?” And we make actually that really easy because we are sharing a lot of, I would say added credit to intensify incentivizing our advertisers to try it at the end of the day that hopefully they can see the result is proven itself.

Lenny: Got it. I think that’s such an interesting point, this idea of testing more, which basically you’re saying with Instagram certain people will see it and that’s not going to be shown tons of random people. So you basically have one shot at getting this in front of the Instagram crowd versus TikTok just tries it, this explore and exploit kind of approach is like, we’ll just keep trying stuff until something sticks.

Ray Cao: Yeah, I think exactly like that 100%. I think a lot of times that I think advertising, especially when digital advertising becomes a thing, so we kind of think everything can be calculated because you have the data, but the beauty of advertising is never like that. The core value advertising is to tell people don’t know you exist and tell them that what you’re doing for them and then creating these demand, right? Discovery is the core of advertising to me because I was never expecting my wife telling me that what she going to buy when she walk into a shopping mall, if I know that I’ll stop her already. She oftentimes that get out something different. So this is not planned. I think that’s literally one of the behavior I would love to emphasize more is you want to be open up your door to more consumer.

Because we are a digital version of word-of-mouth, I always compare us to that because it is the way that how the digital era becomes more human because it is actually helping user to discover new things, just like what they used to do. There’s a new place in a certain area, you just go explore. It is just like that. So I think that’s the reason why I think at the very beginning, continue doing this kind of open-minded testing with us will be a very good approach to get some early learning and eventually that you can refine your approach. But at the beginning I would highly recommend that just be open up and also take some risks with us together and we’re able to show you how much we can actually benefit in the business.

Lenny: Awesome. And on that point, that was the other piece of advice you shared is pay attention to the trends so that you can connect your ad to things that people are already laughing at or finding really interesting. I feel like Duolingo is incredible at this. Their videos are hilarious and I think they’re all just organic videos and a lot of them connected trends that are-

Ray Cao: Yeah. It’s funny you brought up Duolingo because I’m actually now become a heavy user of Duolingo myself because-

Lenny: Me, too.

Ray Cao: I watched the video on the TikTok. I think just basically kids just randomly learn a different language and make a lot of mistakes and it’s really funny. And then I just download the app because I didn’t know. I’ve been using Duolingo for the past 40 days as a New Year resolution. I’m convincing myself to learn Japanese.

Lenny: Wow, 40-day streak?

Ray Cao: Yeah.

Lenny: Amazing. I’m at 25 days.

Ray Cao: Okay, great. We’re on par pretty much.

Lenny: Are you in the Ruby league or Emerald league? Which league are you in right now?

Ray Cao: Emerald, right now.

Lenny: Emerald. Okay. I think I’m in Emerald, too.

Ray Cao: So we’re on par here.

Lenny: Just to close the thread on this, so you’re talking about one of the benefits of TikTok ads is awareness-building basically more top of funnel. I know you also focus a lot on taking action, not just brand awareness. There’s also a lot of, so maybe talk a bit about that, just like that’s also a big part of advertising and TikTok.

Ray Cao: Yeah, I think the beauty of word-of-mouth is actually that word-of-mouth leads to actions. So I think TikTok, we oftentimes people are thinking that, oh, TikTok is really good for building awareness, building upper funnel or some of the discovery funnel. But I really want to say that we want to prove, and also we already proved that from the studies we have seen from third parties that we’re driving actions at the same time, and this is literally the ambition we’re trying to really talk to out of the advertisers, especially on the commerce front, that shopping and TikTok shop and shop ads. It is actually the proven points that we see. And also, this is not necessarily coming off of our illusion, right, because we see there was a biggest trend on TikTok is “TikTok made me buy it.” We have billion level views on that.

It’s continue growing and this literally inspire us to do this product. Like I said, one of the very important things here is we drive our product by listening to our user and see the behavior from them and we see the behavior and now we’re trying to capture that and provide the best service to our user and also help advertisers to reshaping their product. So I do think that this year people will see us more as a full funnel solution platform rather than only building the brands because we want actually impacting on full funnel for our advertisers. Again, driving their business result is more important to us.

Lenny: Say a startup is starting to think about advertising on TikTok, maybe they’ve done some Google ads and Facebook ads. What do you recommend they plan for in order to just see if this could work for them? How much time should they give it? How many ads should they run? How much budget should they allot to just explore this as a growth channel for them?

Ray Cao: I would say at the very beginning, the investment will be coming from their leaning into creating a business account with us. So this is actually how you’re engaging with your community. But even before that, I think just do some research on a platform and be the user as a TikTok to really experiencing it and see the differences. And then you are thinking about how can you actually connecting your behavior or your desired behavior coming from a user with your business and then you’re creating content around it. And that’s the moment I think this first step is creating your business presence on the TikTok.

Lenny: And the idea there is just an organic account you create, let’s say Lenny’s Podcast, which I actually have… my Lenny’s Podcast is on TikTok, so we can use that as an example maybe. So you’re saying start off just creating free business accounts on TikTok and posting videos just to see how it feels and how it goes?

Ray Cao: Yeah. Just see how it feels, right? So maybe some of the videos you don’t get any views and some of the videos, you get more views. At the end of the day you can test some of the advertising products, drive those awareness and see if it’s actually driving impact for you. And then you have to do more maybe testing with us or AB testing or geo-splitting testing eventually, depends on how big the investment is. You can see there is actually a directional impact on your business and also we are giving you reporting and insights on how you’re doing on the platform, so you can optimize in towards that.

But obviously very important part is trying to get a feeling of the platform by creating your organic presence and then try to launch the ads account to make sure that you’re able to drive more traffic to your desired destination or to a desired actions that you want user to take and continue refining that. Along the way, there are a lot of things that you’re going to learn. For example, how can you leverage in automation solutions on the platform and how can leveraging some of the, I would say, creator trends you detected on the platform and also some of the tools that we’re creating to help you to generating those scripts.

So these are all the things that you can learn from the platform. In terms of time investment, I think at the beginning of the month, definitely it’s going to be, I hope it’ll be a little bit more intense of learning so that you’re able to get a rhythm in there and along the way that as long as gets become more automated and also get more understanding towards the business, you’re able to actually creating, I would say, more relevant content for the platforms by leveraging our creators or by leveraging some of your own, I would say, resources from their third party, for example. So I think, yeah, it takes a little bit a learning curve, but I do think that the result will surprise you.

Lenny: And was the implication there, give it a month? Like spend a month of running ads or is that not what you’re saying?

Ray Cao: I think oftentimes we’ll say a month minimum to run ads because I think it’s actually a learning curve for advertisers to really get into understanding the behavior and the platform.

Lenny: And how many ads would you suggest, and I know there’s not a rule of thumb, but just how many ads would you suggest they try to run in that month, to give you a real sense of this could work or no?

Ray Cao: The more, the better. I would say at least 10 different ad creatives will be ideal per week and the more the better.

Lenny: 10 per week. Oh, wow. Okay. So 40 potentially.

Ray Cao: Yeah, 10 per week. Also, I would say we can see that it is a little bit of, I would like nuances there because a lot of, “Oh, I don’t have that resources,” but as simple as possible, it can give you a tool. We have CapCut as a tool. I created my anniversary video for my wife by using that tool. Don’t tell her one-minute now everybody knows, but she thinks that-

Lenny: She might not listen all the way this long to the end of this episode.

Ray Cao: She thinks it takes a lot of time. Literally the production is amazing. We are creating that tool specifically for our creator and also for our monetizer and the user in general. So you’re able to do a lot of, I would say, automated and customized way in the app so you’re able to generate those content on your fingertips. So it will be a really good help for advertisers that want to be more self-service. On the other hand, we also have third parties, certified TikTok service providers on the creative side to help you as well. So depends on the level of how advertiser you are.

Lenny: Is there a most common mistake people make when they try this out where you’re just often being like, “You fool, here’s what you did wrong?” Is there something in there that’s just like, “Just don’t do this thing because a lot of people make this mistake and then they fail on TikTok?”

Ray Cao: Yeah, the first one is I can see a lot of advertiser instantly they want to do remarketing or they want to do a very small niche targeting on the platform because you’re limiting yourself. Like I said, it is more about getting to the rhythm to understand more about platform. So a broader targeting approach is actually recommended at the very early stage and most of advertisers are already doing that today because previously I can see for the first two years in the business, especially when we acquire new advertisers, oftentimes they get on the platform, say, “Hey, I want to do this and that. I want to really refine my targeting, et cetera.” And then we just recommend, “Hey, why don’t we do this comparison? You have a campaign set up like this going on, but this is our recommendation and you can see the difference.” And literally most of them, they’ll see a very big difference over there on it.

Lenny: Amazing. Ray, I know you have to run, I’m going to skip the lightning round, but let me ask you just one question from lightning round. Do you have a favorite TikTok account that you’ve been just really loving these days? I’ll share mine real quick and then see if anything comes to mind. There’s this lady who I found recently who does silent baby product reviews where her baby’s sleeping in the room and she is like, “Shh.” And then she just goes through 20 different baby products very quietly and it’s hilarious. I’ll link to it in the show notes. If you have a kid, you’ll love it. Is there anything that you love or want to highlight?

Ray Cao: I do have one creator I am actually active following is on. He’s a magician. He basically uses very, I would say, very normal things, just handy around him to make something that look very cool magic. I always were like, how did he make that? So I’m actually following that and getting more inspiration on myself is like, “Can I do that? No.” I think that’s more about my personal hobby to see something like that. It’s very, very cool to see people can do these kinds of tricks by using normal stuff around them.

Lenny: Ray, thank you so much for being here. Two last questions. How can folks reach out if they ever want to learn more about this stuff, if they can, and how can listeners be useful to you?

Ray Cao: I think feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn if you want to discuss more about some of the go-to market challenges you’re facing. I think we’re facing a lot of, I would say similar challenges every single day. And also in terms of on the product standpoint, different companies have a different product philosophy. I don’t think we are always right. I was always recommending to receive a lot of feedbacks or recommendations and that would be really, really nice to have to form these kind, leveraging your audience, be my community to teach me a lesson sometimes. That’ll be even better.

Lenny: Amazing. Ray, again, thank you so much for being here. I feel like people don’t have a ton of insight into the way TikTok operates, and I appreciate making time to do this.

Ray Cao: No, it’s a pleasure, Lenny. Thank you very much for having me.

Lenny: Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny’spodcast.com. See you in the next episode.

Glossary

English	中文
3C	3C（计算机、通信、消费电子三类产品统称）
always day one	永远是第一天
APM	APM（初级产品经理，Associate Product Manager）
caliber	caliber（人才水平/能力层级，保留原文）
Context, no control	上下文，而非控制
Emerald league	Emerald 联赛（Duolingo 中的竞赛等级）
Eugene Wei	Eugene Wei（硅谷知名科技博主/分析师）
full funnel	全链路
Go-to-market	市场进入
IC	IC（独立贡献者，Individual Contributor，非管理岗位的个人贡献者）
IO	IO（输入输出环节，此处比喻跨团队沟通中的信息传递开销）
OKR	OKR（目标与关键结果）
Product management theater	产品管理剧场
Ruby league	Ruby 联赛（Duolingo 中的竞赛等级）
Segmentation	细分市场
Shuo	Shuo（TikTok 联合创始人）
Silicon Valley Product Group	硅谷产品集团
TikTok made me buy it	TikTok made me buy it（TikTok 上的热门话题标签，意为”TikTok 让我买了它”）
TikTok Shop	TikTok Shop
Verticals	垂直领域

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